Mise-en-scene Project

     Hi, and welcome back to my AICE Media blog! This past week our class had an especially fun assignment to work on in groups.

    Mise-en-scene (me-seon-seen) is French for “putting on stage” and it represents what is called set design in TV and movies. Mise-en-scene encapsulates everything visible to the audience on screen . Sets, props, framing, lighting, etc. It all falls into the mise-en-scene category. 

    For our project this week, students were given a short personality description and told to create an original character based on the description. Then we were to create multiple “stations” that allowed visitors to glimpse into our characters’ personalities through different mediums. My group was given a paper with something along the lines of “isolated and separate, watching from the sidelines with a dark past destined to come to light as the story goes on.” We interpreted this as a lonely young adult woman living in the city, and Avery Norris was born. 

    We actually decided on making her a woman after flipping a coin and her name was found on a list of popular baby names on Google. A lot of inspiration was also found on Pinterest, Spotify, and from our own lives and interests. Avery had dyed red hair because of an aesthetic picture we all agreed fit her vibe, she liked Phoebe Bridgers’ music because it was recommended by Youtube Music as we created a playlist of songs she liked, and finally she loved to read because we as a team did. 

(Screenshots of our Avery Pinterest board)

Her backstory came to us in bits and pieces, we knew she needed a dark secret to have dramatically revealed by the end of her story, so we started simple. We decided her life started normal, a happy teen living in a small town with an average family. Then we created connections for her, a father in a position of power, some kind of local politician or religious leader, putting eyes on her family and an image for them to protect. Next was a childhood best friend, a boy everyone expected her to marry one day, who loved her but had issues of his own. Finally it came together as this boy trying to attack or take advantage of her in a moment of vulnerability, defending herself spiraling into a deadly attack, and a town turned against her. After feeling so abandoned by those who claim to love her, Avery decided that pain was too great, running away and swearing off connection forever. 

However, we needed to show that she wasn’t cold or heartless, simply damaged by her experiences. This led to another Pinterest fueled idea, a pet kitten named Poe was created to display her desire for companionship, but inability to trust in other people. Finally, our little cast was filled out by the addition of Evan Briggs. The group wanted to give hope to Avery for a true bond with another person, a polar opposite to her with the ability to crack her iron shield and reach her heart. Evan was thought of as an optimistic, kind hearted person with the genuine desire to get to know Avery better. Unfortunately, we also needed to keep Avery true to her character, choosing to repeat her cycle of abandonment as a method of self preservation. Her final character description ended up something like this.

“A 23 year old NYU student studying English while working as a line cook in a run down diner nearby. She came to New York as a way to avoid the toxic past she left in her small hometown. Since the events that occurred all those years ago, Avery closed herself off to friends and love, living as a loner the majority of the time.

However, despite this standoffish behavior, she yearns for company and companionship again. This leads her to adopt her cat, Poe, named after her favorite poet, Edgar Allen Poe. Avery cut off contact with her parents and almost everyone from her past life, a difficult choice she had to make for herself. Still, nightmares about her past constantly, and she turns to reading as a way to avoid sleep.

As she lives her solitary life, she meets Evan Briggs, a fellow line cook with dreams of culinary school and opening his own restaurant. Evan is Avery’s polar opposite with his lighthearted and charming personality , and he wants nothing more than to bring her out of her shell.

However, in the end, Avery is a self fulfilling prophecy, she believes she is destined to be alone, and therefore pushes everyone away. She ends up packing her bags in the night and skipping town without telling Evan or anyone else. Doomed to ruin her own happiness”

    Not the happy end one might hope for, I realize. Yet, it shows who she is at her core and how she was described to us in our assignment. In the end, we included the fore mentioned playlist, a mood board based on our existing Pinterest board, color palette, and a room design along with this description.  All of which will be linked at the bottom of this post. 

    All in all, this project was one of the most creatively enjoyable that I’ve worked on in a while. It contained a fun challenge and allowed us enough independence to feel like we were in control of our own work. Thanks for reading!

Link to Avery Norris final submission drive - https://tinyurl.com/AveryNorrisDoc

AICE Media Sound #1 and #2

                         Sound Projects This Week 

Sound Project #1 - Werewolf Soundscape 

 In our AICE Media class this week and last we’ve been working on the process of sound design for tv and film. We discussed synchronous, asynchronous, and diegetic sound. Our first assignment was to create aa soundscape to tell an interesting story through just sound with no visuals. My partner and I got together immediately and began brainstorming possibilities for the project.

    We decided to tell the story of a man transforming into a werewolf as it gave us an opportunity to utilize a lot of different sounds. Our first scene was a couple named Bella and Jacob lost in the woods at night, calling for each other as they had been somehow separated. Next, Jacob would look into the night sky and realize the moon was full, about to begin his transition. Finally, he would painfully change into the wolf and begin to hunt Bella, his friend turned prey. 

    Something really important to us was that Jacob’s transformation came across well through the sound as we were unable to include any visuals. The sound of t-shirts ripping, rubber being stretched, and snapping celery were a few common sounds we used to simulate skin stretching and breaking bones. A shout or groan of pain every few seconds and a single long howl at the end left us pretty happy with our final product. 

    A fun challenge was layering background noises and main audio to realistically set the scene. The cricket chirping as well as owl hooting did a great job communicating woods at nighttime and distant wolf howling was almost foreshadowing the story’s climax. We also created a lot of this ambience noise ourselves, going outside to snap twigs and crunch dry leaves to simulate walking and moving around the forrest. 

    However a less fun challenge and something we struggled with was the editing process. My partner and I split the editing work evenly by having me do the first two scenes, and her do the last two. Our editing program, Clipchamp, struggled to save or load our work when both of us worked on the same file. In the end, we had to work on our respective halves separately and save both before stitching them together for our final product. 

    Here is the link to our final product soundscape: PopescuCofino_soundscape_Per5

    Sound Project #2 - Adding Sound to One Word Film    

For our next sound project, our class was sent back to another project of ours, the one word film from last month. We took the previously silent video and added whatever audio we felt appropriate for each scene. This project felt much easier than our last sound assignment, we didn’t have to come up with a new idea and were able to build off what we already had in our original video. We had to work on the editing of this project independently so my partner and I created a list of required sound effects and set off to edit the same video in our own styles. 

    I downloaded necessary sounds such as footsteps, generic background chatter, etc. and a few more stylistic such as a dramatic note for the climax of the video. The editing was done on Clipchamp, same as the first assignment and only took about half an hour to complete in its entirety.

    This is link to my final One Word Project with sound: OWFSound_Popescu